


Before The Day Is Done

by trace_of_scarlet



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, In which Umbridge gets what she deserves, Minerva McGonagall's last fuck was given in the First Wizarding War, Neville Longbottom is still more badass than he thinks he is, Queer McGonagall, Shut the hell up Dolores, Umbridge is honestly more hatable than Voldemort, mcgonagall pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-09
Updated: 2019-06-09
Packaged: 2020-04-23 17:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19155676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trace_of_scarlet/pseuds/trace_of_scarlet
Summary: “Is this a test, Professor?”McGonagall raises her eyebrows at him. “This is life, Longbottom: everything is a test."What was it that Molly Weasley had screamed at Bellatrix, lost in the fury of battle? ‘You will never hurt our children again’? Oh, how she wishes she still had so much faith left.In the aftermath of the Battle of Hogwarts, McGonagall finally gets the chance to arrest Umbridge. But she hasn't entirely counted on taking young Mr. Longbottom along to do the job with her...





	Before The Day Is Done

**Author's Note:**

> I originally wrote this a few years ago, but I handwrite the first draft of all my fic and never quite got around to typing this up until I rediscovered it recently! Title comes from the Florence + The Machine Song 'Seven Devils'.
> 
> With thanks to my beloved Eric for once again undertaking beta duties.

She isn’t quite as surprised as she really ought to have been when the Ministry owl lands on her desk in the middle of the day, preening its feathers with the variety of distinctive self-importance only a Ministry owl can attain. After all, she _had_ asked to be kept abreast of certain developments, though given the mess left in the Ministry after the Dark Lord’s eventual downfall she _is_ a little surprised to hear from Kingsley Shacklebolt so quickly.

The message is in Kingsley’s distinctive style, brief and very much to the point, and even as she reads it she is calculating her timetable, seeing if the other staff can manage without her for the remainder of the day. She might be Headmistress now but she does still have to teach her classes, and whilst Filius Flitwick is more than capable of covering the lower-level courses - providing of course that they do not clash with his own duties - she really ought to teach the more advanced students herself. Luckily, however, she has already taught both of her NEWT classes for the day, and Gryffindor’s OWLs students are generally more than willing to exchange an extra free period today for a double-length lesson tomorrow. Therefore, she dashes off a quick memo to Filius, Horace Slughorn and Pomona Sprout and sends her Patroni off with it while she hastily packs the tiny overnight case she has been using since the Grindelwald War. The whole process takes less than ten minutes, but even so all three of her deputies have responded by the time she is done. Filius and Horace merely send their acquiescence, but Pomona, who - for all that she would be happiest spending her days resembling an ambulatory small bush - has always been the most perceptive of the three, sends, along with her blessing, several particularly choice spell recommendations.

To the Ministry, then. She steps into the fire and is gone in a _whoosh_ of purple smoke.

Kingsley is waiting for her outside his office door - or is perhaps caught there as he deals with a young minion apparently from Accounting. He greets her with a brief smile and a nod, and as they stand and talk she is conscious of a small adoring crowd that grows around them like the incoming tide. Perhaps she shouldn’t be too surprised - after all, they may not be the Chosen One ( _he_ is lurking down at the Auror Office with his usual little coterie), but it is nevertheless a matter of very public record that the two of them and Horace Slughorn jointly duelled the Dark Lord at the Battle of Hogwarts and lived to tell the tale. (She wonders if they know that her first spell hit Voldemort almost by accident as she leapt to Blaise Zabini’s defence from Rookwood, and that the ensuing moments, before Kingsley and Horace came to her support, were amongst the most terrified she has ever been.) Eventually, and at a brief pause in their discussion, she jerks her head at their audience.

“Perhaps I should have brought Horace with me,” she remarks tartly. “They could have had the full Chocolate Frog set.”

That surprises a rumble of laughter from him, and sends the crowd skittering back in gawping alarm. “Come into my office,” he suggests. “I’ll tell you the rest of the details in private.”

She takes a seat in front of his desk, prim and neat as ever, and pretends she does not want those details very, very badly. Has not been looking forward to today ever since that first achingly, infuriatingly appalled moment that one of her pupils - of her children! - had first shown her what he had been forced to carve into his own flesh. At _her_ school. Her lips press together tightly.

“Where is she?” she says, dangerously quiet and contained. “How long have I got?”

Kingsley taps a roll of parchment with his wand and reads the details from it as it unrolls. “Dolores Jane Umbridge appears to have taken over an empty Muggle cottage in the New Forest - two rooms upstairs and two down. We think it was once a wizarding dwelling, judging by the shielding - she appears to have merely reactivated and reinforced very old anti-detection wards rather than setting up her own.”

“Sloppy,” McGonagall comments, with professional disapprobation. “But how like Dolores to claim others’ work for herself.”

“Harder to detect, though,” Kingsley reminds her, with the same judicial impartiality she remembers him displaying as Hogwarts Head Boy. “We very nearly missed her - as it was, we were just lucky one of Tonks’ old Sneakoscopes hadn’t been fully deactivated and Ronald Weasley happened to be paying attention to it.”

Her lips thin; she feels the old mask returning. The old war-armour: hex-proof, or almost, while she feels sick at heart. “That girl… Trust Tonks not to secure her tools correctly.”

“And trust Tonks to find a way to win by doing so.” Kingsley frowns, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I’d never have told her so, of course, but at the time she was easily the most talented trainee Auror I’d seen in years. How did we let it happen, Min?"

She’d object to ‘Min’ from just about anyone, let alone a former pupil, but from Kingsley she hasn’t got the heart. Not today, and perhaps not ever. Not anymore.

“By being too few, and too weak, and too old,” she says instead, brutal as the truth, and sips the tea the Ministry elf has brought her. “Just as our elders were before us.”

And isn’t that the truth of it: what they have done is only what has been done before, and for all their high hopes they have done it no better than anyone before them. There are no watersheds, no true revolutions; only the turning of the hands of the clock, and the trickling of sand. She has seen it all before; she can only hope that they can now buy themselves enough time that she will not need to see it again.

“Kingsley.” He looks up at her over the parchment from which Dolores Umbridge’s face toad-smirks at them. “How long have I got?”

He frowns in brief consideration. “I should be able to keep it out of the Auror Office inbox for at least eight hours, but I certainly won’t be able to pretend I haven’t seen the trackers’ memo for much after seven tomorrow morning.”

Twelve hours at the outside, then, she thinks, and sets the little pocketwatch she has been using for these sorts of affairs ever since her father gave it to her as a twenty-first birthday present. Kingsley’s fingers drum heavily on the desk. “And, Minerva? Please try to bring her back alive - we still have some Muggleborns unaccounted-for that we think she can help us with.”

She feels the chill drop over her shoulders again as she stands to go, as if she wore a cloak of ice. “Of course, Minister.”

Her hand on the doorknob, she looks back at him without flinching. “After all, one cannot send a corpse to Azkaban.”

Outside the door, the crowd has dispersed in search of a new circus, or just possibly to get some actual work done, so that the only face she sees as the door clicks shut is that of Neville Longbottom (still a little too pale, still a little too thin), who has apparently been there for some time. Even now, several months after what the _Prophet_ insists on calling the Battle of Hogwarts and the fame his exploits in it have brought him, he looks nervous, ill at ease, as if expecting the other shoe to drop - which, to be fair to the boy, history suggests it still very well might.

“Good morning, Longbottom.” She would make her voice brisk, but she has no need: it does that automatically. “Waiting to see the Minister?”

“Good morning, Professor,” he says automatically, but fiddles with his cuffs. “Actually, I was, er, hoping to speak to _you_?”

“Very well.” She waits, but Longbottom seems to be having difficulty with his words again and she is conscious that every minute she waits for speech is a minute she is losing. “Well, Longbottom, what is it?”

“Susan - Susan Bones, she’s at the Auror Office with me, and she says they’ve found Umbridge,” he finally says, in a rush like a stampede of desks. “She said they think she’s been in the New Forest for months, and the chatter is that you’ve persuaded Kingsley Shacklebolt to let you go after her.”

Oh, for the love of Merlin’s spotty undercrackers, this place has more leaks than the plumbing in Atlantis. She fixes Longbottom with a gimletty stare, the kind that’s sent generations of witches and wizards longing for a merciful death. “And _if_ , young Longbottom, your girlfriend _had_ somehow obtained Head of Department-level information and was spreading it about to all and sundry with careless disregard for the Wizarding Secrets Act - to say nothing of her own chances of getting through her final Ridiculous Auror Trials - what exactly would that have to do with you?”

He gulps, but at least doesn’t look at his shoes - not even after the shot about his girlfriend, which she was only about ninety-percent confident of. Either she’s finally losing her touch (highly unlikely) or that final, horrendous year at Hogwarts really did see him grow up. “Well?”

He is now roughly the colour of a scalded cauldron, but still managing to meet her eyes - which is actually bordering on the impressive. “I want to help, Professor. Er, please.”

“Oh, really?” She crosses her arms. “And _if_ I were going to do this - which, by the way, I’m not saying I am - why should _you_ accompany me?”

“Um.” He takes a deep breath; she waits. “Because Auror Regulation 142 paragraph 13 says that no Auror shall attempt the arrest of a known hostile suspect being without the minimum backup of at least one other of-age witch or wizard.”

And if only he knew just how many good witches and wizards that rule had entirely failed to save…

“Did you memorise that bit particularly, Longbottom?” she enquires, and when he manages to go still redder in response she adds, “Anything else you’d like to say?”

“...Um. Because she hurt my friends, but she always left me alone, because - because I didn’t shout at her like Harry or Seamus or Lee did, I just kept my mouth shut, when maybe I could have got away more than they did because I’m pureblood. But by the time I was brave enough, it was too late. He gives an unhappy little shrug. “And I want to - to make up for that, I suppose.”

“Hmm.” Her fingers drum against her arm as she considers his request. She has enough confidence in his abilities to expect that he should at least be able to keep up with her, but Dolores Umbridge is - despite the obfuscating obsession with pinkness - an exceptionally capable witch and will be desperate. She remembers when she brought in Antonin Dolohov, how he struggled and screamed even through a succession of Stunning spells all the way to his cell in Azkaban. Truthfully she cannot blame them for doing so - the prospect of an extended stay in that place would have made Godric Gryffindor himself wet his pants, she is sure - but she has no sympathy for them either. They have all made their beds, and if they have chosen to make them out of murdered children and Unforgivable Curses then she has no compunction about ensuring that they lie in them.

But still. But still. Longbottom is not a stupid child - though in his schooldays he often seemed to strive to give that impression - and he has many times over earned the right to face the monsters of the world he must now inhabit as an adult.

“Have you anything further to say on the matter?”

He hesitates again, a trait she thinks he may never lose: it certainly marks him out from Potter and Weasley and Finnegan and the rest of his pell-mell fellow Gryffindors. “Um. If you - if you don’t want to take me, then there’s Harry and Ron and Ginny and Dean and Susan, and they’d probably all be better than me too, honestly. But you shouldn’t go alone.”

Even now, even after the Battle of Hogwarts, even having fought Voldemort (she has fought him and seen him fall; she will call him by his name even if it still makes her shudder) with Godric Gryffindor’s own sword, he remains convinced that there is always someone more worthy than he. She feels a sudden stab of sympathy for the boy, and a flash of anger at Augusta for raising a child so outstandingly low in self-esteem.

“Who have they put in charge at the Auror Office now - Bright?” Her foot taps, impatient: she has already lost too much time. “Tell her Minerva McGonagall will be urgently requiring your services for the next six to ten hours, probably closer to six. When she protests, remind her which office at Hogwarts I occupy these days, and then refer her to the Minister when she tells you she doesn’t care.”

He brightens fast as a firework; for a moment he moves as if to hug her before common sense thankfully prevails and he merely goes dashing down the corridor with a shouted “Thank you! Won’t be a minute!”

“...Good grief.” She shakes her head at Longbottom’s retreating back: damn her sentiment, she must be getting old. Nevertheless, she has now made the boy a promise, and she keeps her word: before Copernica Bright can send her inevitable memo of complaint, therefore, she knocks on the door of Kingsley’s office to explain the slightly altered circumstances.

Kingsley is clearly mildly surprised when she advises him of her choice of travelling companion, but makes no objection; in fact, she thinks he probably suspects her of doing it purely to bait Copernica Bright, with whom she has had roughly one spat per decade since leaving Hogwarts and one per week while they shared a Gryffindor dormitory (teenage relationships being what they are). In truth the consideration had only occurred to her _after_ she had made her decision, but she has never before turned down an opportunity to cause Copernica to explode with fury and she is far too old to start now.

When she once again permits Kingsley’s office door to close on her back, Longbottom is waiting for her - mildly surprising, as she had expected to wait a good ten minutes and by her count he has been a mere eight and a half.

“Ready?” she demands, and when he nods enthusiastically she leads him down towards the Floor Portals at a brisk pace, as if chaperoning him on a school trip.

“I know a warlock in Selwood who operates a Floo Portal,” she advises him in the lift to the floorplaces. “From there, it will be strictly Muggle: if Umbridge has even a quarter of the sense I think she has - to say nothing of the paranoia I _know_ she has - she will have magic-detecting wards up for at least a quarter of a mile around the cottage.”

Longbottom nods. “But won’t they still detect our innate magic, Professor?”

“Five points to Gryffindor,” she notes, dry but approving. “However, the standard wards you’ve been taught about are particularly easy to pick out by other magic-users, and Umbridge has gone a full six months without detection, so I strongly suspect her of using the wards which only detect _active_ magic.” She glances at Longbottom, who appears rapt. “Have you travelled Muggle-fashion before?”

He shakes his head. “Gran never let us - I think she thinks Muggles are a bit beneath us, you know?”

“Well, it didn’t stop her from courting all those Muggleborns at Hogwarts,” she remarks darkly as the life doors open, and enjoys a full four minutes of silence before Longbottom stops being too shocked to speak.

“Gran had _boyfriends_?”

And at least one girlfriend, as she recalls, but that’s for Augusta to tell her grandson, not for her.

“Indeed,” she says. “We elderly were not _born_ fossilised, you know.”

She is gone through the Floo before he can gather his wits to reply.

~*~

Longbottom acquits himself well as they board the Muggle bus, or at any rate he keeps his mouth shut and follows her example, which is essentially the same thing. She is grateful for the recurring fad for Muggle clothing: it means he passes for a Muggle quite well provided he doesn’t open his mouth, which he looks quite happy not to do. They disembark just outside the village of Frogham, her suitcase like his safely transfigured into respectably battered rucksacks, and circle round the fringes of the forest briefly before disappearing into the woods. She is navigating for both of them, using the old Muggle methods she used during the Grindelwald War (it is almost a comfort, to use the tricks she used in her youth) and it is some time before Longbottom speaks.

“Am I in trouble, Professor?”

“With me? No.” She frowns, glancing at him: he is pale but determined. “You are no longer at school, so I could hardly punish you - even if I wanted to. Although I cannot guarantee that you’ll be Copernica’s favourite boy when you return.”

“Oh. Okay.” He seems a little mollified, but only fractionally. “Are you two enemies?”

“At last count, she’s saved my life three times and I have saved hers four. We just didn’t particularly like doing so.” She glances across just in time enough to spot a glistening thin strand dangling like a spider’s web from a tree within a fraction of his head. “Longbottom, straighten yourself!”

He plainly doesn’t understand, but obeys the ‘teacher’ voice as automatically as she knew he would, and misses the strand by inches. Under his startled gaze she produces her wand from her sleeve and uses it as a pointer to draw his attention to the delicate, silvery hair quivering in the breeze.

“In my day, Longbottom, Aurors called it ‘spider’s lace’. I daresay Umbridge’s wards will not detect your innate magic, but _this_ certainly will.” Her eyes narrow as she observes its modifications. “And will meddle with your memories as well, judging by the way it twists. See the second strand plaited in? That’s a Pensieve thread, unless I’m very much mistaken. Umbridge really must be letting the paranoia bite.” _Not that it will save her,_ she thinks with absolute certainty, and - lesson over - she puts up her wand. “Pay attention, Longbottom!”

He startles to attention, pale hazel eyes wide as a child’s. “Yes, Professor.”

They walk on in silence for nearly half an hour, and to Longbottom’s credit there are no further incidents despite no shortage of traps left for any and all of Umbridge’s pursuers. It is a miracle, Minerva thinks, that no-one else has yet been caught by them - although there are at least two involuntary Portkeys which could very well have been activated without leaving anyone the wiser. This has clearly occurred to the boy, too, because he finally breaks their silence by turning to her with the remark that the Ministry will need to despatch a team of Sweepers to clear the place out before someone gets hurt.

“Five points to Gryffindor,” she tells him again, and gets a surprised look as he tries to work out whether or not she’s joking and finally decides she probably mostly is. “Copernica really will adore us when you report back to her.”

“Oh.” A pause whilst he thinks about this: after fifty years spent teaching Gryffindors, she has learned to appreciate the way he takes the time to think about something before he responds to it, even if his chronic lack of self-confidence means he second-guesses himself so much that he still often gets the answer wrong. The boy has good instincts - she saw that much in his final years of schooling, to say nothing of in that last battle - but he needs to learn to have more faith in them. Copernica Bright, she hopes, is the right woman to teach him that. “Why?” he asks, eventually. “I mean, isn’t that what the DMLE is _for_?”

“Indeed it is.” Carefully she manoeuvres her way around another clump of spider’s lace: after her earlier strictures about being careful, it wouldn’t do to make silly mistakes. “But Copernica is… cautious. That’s almost certainly why the Minister gave her the job: we have far too few Aurors left to be able to waste them needlessly.”

After all, isn’t that what the war was for? In peacetime they try to avoid needless deaths; they store them up ready for battle, instead.

“Oh.” Another thoughtful pause; in any other situation she would search the look on his face, but at present she is preoccupied with searching their surroundings instead, hunting for Umbridge’s next vicious trick. ‘If you can see only one step ahead’, she remembers Albus telling her, in Swansea during a 1943 air raid, ‘You will still only be able to react. See them three or more steps ahead, and their plan is yours to do with as you will.’ What is Umbridge’s next move? Is she holed up in her stolen cottage like a cornered rat, as the traps suggest, or does she plan to die gloriously for her ideals? Is she even there at all?

“So how did you -” Longbottom begins, then cuts himself off so abruptly it is like the snapping of a trap. “Professor, is that it? Is that the cottage?”

She squints in the direction he is pointing, but can see nothing. “Where, Longbottom? I don’t see it.”

“Just up ahead, Professor - about sixty, seventy feet.” He turns a worried round face on hers. “You really don’t see it?”

“No.” Her answer is terse, snappish; the boy falls silent. What is she missing? What has Umbridge done? What would it benefit her, to be choosy concerning her illusions? Several answers come to mind, but she doesn’t particularly care for any of them. “Longbottom, do you happen to have any Muggles - or Muggleborns - in your family tree?”

He has enough sense to give her the answer without asking why - a definite point in his favour. “I don’t… think so? My cousin Thurgood married a Muggleborn, but I don’t know of any who’re… blood-related to me, I suppose you’d say.”

“Hmm.” Can Umbridge _really_ be so stupid and arrogant? she wonders incredulously. Well, she _did_ insult a herd of armed centaurs… “Apparently,” she says, slowly, “You are in fact going to be absolutely indispensable today, Longbottom. Do try not to let it go to your head.”

He looks as perplexed as if she had demanded he brew a Polyjuice Potion: she suspects he is wondering if she’s making another joke. “I don’t understand, Professor.”

“I strongly suspect, Longbottom, that our quarry is so monumentally arrogant that she genuinely believes no Pureblood could disagree with her enough to come chasing her.” She is shocked by her own fury: partially it is professional disapprobation at such sloppy work, but primarily it is the realisation that in many cases Umbridge would be right, that if their world does not act, she will _always_ be at least partially right. “She has put an illusion on the cottage so that Muggleborns cannot see it.”

“You’re a _Muggleborn_?” Longbottom demands, and she doesn’t particularly care for the note of surprise, innocent as it may be.

“Partially correct.” Her voice is sharp and hard. “My father was a Muggle; my mother, however, was a Prewett.”

“Oh,” he says, and has the sense not to pursue the subject further. “So, how do we break it? The illusion, I mean.”

“Well, not by standing here gossiping, certainly.” She taps her foot, weighing up her options. “I could bring the illusion down by force, now that I know it’s there, but doing so would give Umbridge a great deal of warning. What did you learn about illusions in Charms, Longbottom?”

He frowns. “Um, that they’re… one of the three branches of transitory magic, so they need, um… regular reinforcing unless they’re tethered to a central focus point or, um, _crux_ \- no, omphalos - and that they can be torn down by force with the right counter-spell.”

“Very good, Longbottom. Flitwick always _was_ under the impression you were paying more attention in his classes than your examination results suggested.” This isn’t entirely fair: the staff (Snape excluded, but then Severus never really indulged in the fancy for understanding one’s students) had a long-standing theory that the boy’s tenuous grasp on his own magic was at least partially caused by his childhood trauma: being present, even at so young an age, at the extended torture of one’s own parents has long been speculated as acting as an inhibitor of magical development. And surely Augusta’s morbid insistence that he use his dead father’s wand could hardly have helped.

The boy merely grins at her. “Good to know Professor Flitwick was paying attention too, Professor,” he says, but looks startled when she laughs, as if surprised to have made her chuckle.

“Well, be that as it may, we now have three options.” She ticks them off on her fingers. “One: you would be required to go inside the cottage alone and break the wards yourself, by whatever means necessary, to permit me to enter. Two: we wait for Umbridge to venture out to reinforce the wards: they probably haven’t been properly anchored, or the magic levels involved would have given her away earlier. And three…”

He catches the questioning note as she pauses, as she knew he would, and throws it back to her, as she hoped he would. “Um… break down the wards from outside by force?”

“Quite.” She raises a brow, thinking _We really should have paid more overt attention to the boy in school._ Oh, they’d protected him as far as possible, of course, but really some more direct intervention would have been mutually rewarding. The boy is really quite interesting to teach… “What are your thoughts?”

He blinks. “Is this a test, Professor?”

McGonagall raises her eyebrows at him. “This is life, Longbottom: _everything_ is a test. Answers, please - we’ve not got all day.”

He flushes somewhat, but she’d been reasonably certain he did have answers for her - or at least some decent ideas - and she turns out to be principally correct.

“Well… Breaking the wards by force is going to take quite a long time and use a lot of magic, so she’ll have too much warning and it might not work anyway. Waiting for her to come out might take days and you already said, we don’t have much time. So I think,” he pauses, swallows then continues, voice quite steady, “So I think I should go in on my own and raise the wards.”

“Quite certain, Mr. Longbottom?” she enquires, which is the _real_ test - if he has the nous to spot it.

“Yes,” he says immediately, and thus earns himself the easiest pass of his young life. “It’s, uh, risky, because I don’t have very much experience? But it’s the best option we have.”

Actually, she thinks, looking at his worried round face, you have entirely too _much_ experience for your age. And perhaps they have Umbridge and her ilk to thank for that, but she blames herself and her generation, too. After all, they should never have let it go so far; never let these people think they were acceptable in the first place. “Very well. And are you quite certain you will be able to recognise and deactivate the omphalos?”

He gawps at her unabashedly, and suddenly it is as if they are back safe in her Hogwarts classroom all over again. “You mean I got it _right_?”

“No, I just lack the breath to correct you.” She raises her eyebrows at him ironically. “Of course you were right, Longbottom. Now answer the question, please.”

He gulps again, but it is smaller and much less noticeable this time. “Um. No? But I’m pretty sure.”

“Then you have learned the main thing about being an Auror - that _anything_ in an operation can and will go wrong.” She is not at all certain that she does right by him in allowing this, but the boy is quite right: there is not really any other option. And in some ways, perhaps it is better that he risk his neck against a vicious but biased creature like Umbridge than against a Dolohov or a Goyle whose only ideologies now are violence and escape. “Very good, Mr. Longbottom. Off you go.”

He looks about ready to say something more, but changes his mind at the look on her face; instead he merely leaves her with a cursory, “See you, Professor.”

(She is grateful: had he spoken more, she might very well have been tempted to rescind her order. But the boy is of-age and of experience, and has made a choice: he will have to live with it - or not - as all adults must. As must she.)

As it is she can do nothing; but then, it was ever thus. She merely settles back into the trees, blending in as far as possible without the use of magic, and ensures her view of where the cottage ought to be is as clear as possible before she begins her vigil.

She must concede, watching him approach the place, she is quite impressed: oh, _she_ can follow his progress with only a little difficulty, but she knows he is there, and of course she has more than sixty years of training in seeing that which others would rather she did not. Umbridge - whose files say that she has no such training; hence her desecration of old Mad-Eye’s corpse - if she has the wit to be looking, will doubtless be exceptionally lucky to catch a glimpse of the boy at all. Probably, McGonagall reflects, it was all that sneaking around the boy did at school, without the help of Potter’s Invisibility Cloak (long the curse of the staff room).

It is not long, even to her tensed mind, before Longbottom disappears entirely behind the wards’ soft embrace, and then there is truly nothing she can do but wait.

She waits so long, in fact, that she can feel her joints stiffen by degrees and feel the wind turn damp and chilly across her face. (She keeps meaning to see a Healer about her rheumatism, but always has more important things to do.) She forces herself to shift and stretch, faintly irritated at herself for needing to do so. _I should never have grown old,_ she thinks, and smiles like dry bread, _There’s no future in it._

And where _is_ Longbottom anyway? How can such a simple task be taking him so long? She is being unfair, she knows, and she doesn’t care, because she needs to be at the battle, seeing as he sees. It’s at times like this that she understand Nymphadora Tonks’ mad dash to a warzone: foolhardy as it was to leave her child behind, had things been different McGonagall doubts that she, too, could have failed to resist the call to arms; the need to _know_.

And then the cottage (battered; inexplicably painted cheap pink) flickers into existence right in front of her, and even after this summer she can’t remember the last time she moved so fast.

Inside the place is a mess, and she realises why only in just enough time that Umbridge’s spell misses her transformation by inches. The cottage houses a riot of the tawdry feline memorabilia which she has been yearning to set on fire ever since they first met, but at the moment it provides sufficiently useful cover to let her hunt for Longbottom undetected as the full force of Umbridge’s hate and paranoia explodes in poisonous pink glitter all around her.

He isn’t hard to find - she must find time, later, to impress on him the need to perfect his Disillusionment charms - and jumps when she turns back into herself just behind him. He’s curled up behind boxes with his right leg at an unhealthy angle, watching Umbridge’s chaos with his grip white-knuckle-tight on his wand as he tries to defuse it all at once. There is one thing to be grateful for: Umbridge is so busy raising hell that she has entirely forgotten to employ her brain, and is thus creating so much chaos as to forestall any attempt to actually _find_ her intruders. He looks up at McGonagall with the same determined terror she remembers seeing on his mother’s face, whenever a job had gone wrong with work still to do - the kind of look with which, the head of the Auror Office had always sworn, Alice Longbottom could conquer the world and then be surprised that she had done so. He reminds McGonagall very much of his mother, in fact, and so she responds as she would have done if it were Alice looking up at her, and smiles.

“Wand up, Longbottom,” she reminds him, and stoops to inspect the damage to his leg. “Your ankle?”

“I fell awkwardly,” he admits wryly, and hisses through his teeth when she tries to move it. “I’m always doing that.”

“Alice managed to catch a Death Eater that way, once,” she informs him briskly, trying to see if she can fix his ankle and feeling annoyingly certain she can’t. “Fell straight onto Antonia Strangeways while she was under an Invisibility Cloak and arrested her before either of them could get back up… But then she was always a natural, however much it surprised her.”

 _That_ makes him laugh; he seems as surprised by it as he was by her smile. “What about my dad? Was he like that too?”

“Oh, no - generally we sent Alice in first, then Frank picked up the pieces afterwards. He was always happier in the kitchen with his brews and potions, really, but he’d never have let Alice do this sort of thing without him. And he was an excellent Healer - steady hands, calm under pressure.” It probably says something about her career that this is far from being the most outré conversation she has ever had under fire; frankly, she is mostly shocked that Augusta has clearly never told the boy any of the real stories of his parents’ exploits. “I’m going to bind your ankle,” she informs him. “Can you manage?”

A poison-arrow-pink firecracking arches overhead; she feels her hair frizzle in the heat and says ‘thank you’ primly as Longbottom destroys it mid-air before leaning back, white-faced. 

“I think so, Professor,” he says sturdily, but bites his lower lip until it bleeds. “I always have before.”

What was it that Molly Weasley had screamed at Bellatrix, lost in the fury of battle? ‘You will never hurt our children again’? Oh, how she wishes she still had so much faith left.

“Stay here,” she says grimly, when the leg is firmly strapped. “Find yourself an _exit_ strategy. If necessary, I expect you to use it without me.” There is no smile on her face now; she is as hard and resolute as he thought her when she first scared him in Hogsmeade, shopping for his first Hogwarts uniform with his grandmother. “I am quite old and ugly enough to take care of myself.”

He doesn’t say anything, or at least she doesn’t give him the opportunity to do so before she rises and leaves him.

In the continuing chaos she has lost track of Umbridge’s location; still she doesn’t believe that the woman has had enough sense to flee. _Fine_ , she thinks, and shrinks once again to her cat-shape to avoid detection; let this be Dolores Umbridge’s last stand. At any rate it will be more than she deserves.

Umbridge, it transpires, is actually upstairs: it’s the gently creaking floorboards which give her away. (The way sounds shatter and split like slate has always been the strangest and most wonderful aspect of an existence with four paws: the ability to differentiate effortlessly between sounds and sources has saved her life more times than she cares to count, too.) She ducks the incoming hex, feels rather than sees Longbottom extinguish another before it can arc over her head (he’s rather good at that: presumably too much time spent with the Weasley twins) and slips up the stairs - and though her old bones may creak for _her_ , realistically she knows she does so without making a sound.

Umbridge can be seen from the top of the stairs: she’s crouched in a corner like a victim amid the bombsite of pink and tawdry knick-knacks, apparently following the proceedings below with a silver mirror. McGonagall thinks: _It’s a trap; she must know I am here. It is a trap._

And yet she goes forward anyway, because she has her training and her duty, and still Umbridge does not move.

At last, when they are scant feet apart, McGonagall transforms, feeling herself flow upwards like a plant in sunlight, and still the trap doesn’t spring but at last Umbridge does look up at her. She is shocked: not that it is _new_ for this woman to shock her, but whatever she expected from her, it wasn’t this. Umbridge’s skin is paper-grey and flabby at the edges where she has lost too much weight too quickly; she seems to have been wearing the same unironed fuchsia robes for at least a week, and her eyes and nose are reddened like those of a rat caught in a trap.

“So, _this_ is the wizarding master race?” McGonagall demands, appalled at both of them, but her heart is not truly in it and anyway Umbridge doesn’t even seem to hear her.

“Have you come to rescue me?” Her face is upturned to meet McGonagall’s but her eyes keep darting back to the mirror like a pinned ferret, searching desperately for a way out. “I was - I was Imperiused, I’ve been Imperiused for years, and then I woke up and I was here, and I don’t know where I am, and -”

It is sickening, this babble of weak excuses like a drunkard’s vomit. She is angry again now, and is grateful for it: it will make the task that much easier.

“Please, you don’t understand, I -”

“Bollocks,” McGonagall says bluntly, and cuts Umbridge off mid-cringe. “You were not under the Imperius Curse when you forced my children to scar themselves; you were not _hexed_ into sending innocents to Azkaban for imaginary impurities of their blood. Tell your nonsense to the Dementors, Dolores - no-one else is ever going to care.”

It is as if she has pressed an invisible trigger: Umbridge springs at her, spitting “Mudblood bitch!” like a raging cat, and knocks her wand from her hand in a shower of Gryffindor sparks. She is slower than she used to be (once, there was a time when no-one could match her speed, and she gloried in it) but in seconds _she_ is the cat, slipping effortlessly away from Umbridge’s grasp and dodging enemy spells as she scrambles for her wand. She transforms again the instant her paw hits it and twists around to fire all in one smooth movement, and then Umbridge is falling backwards in one long scream of fury as the Body-Bind Curse locks around her limbs like gravity.

The screech reverberates like silence in her ears, blotting out even the complaints her back is now issuing for forcing it to commit such an idiotic manoeuvre. She orders herself to stand, and has to do so with such exaggerated care that she is grateful that only Umbridge - who no longer counts for anything - is here to see her do it. Nevertheless, she looks down at the figure now lying screaming on the floor at her feet, and still does not lower her weapon even as she finds Umbridge’s five-inch oak wand on the floor and hears it crack irreparably under her boot.

“Professor?”

A ruffled head pokes cautiously above the stairs, and she has to forcibly override the instinct to react as if to an enemy. 

“I said wand _up_ , Longbottom,” she orders instead, but still can barely be heard over the screams from the floor. “Oh, do shut _up_ , Dolores!”

There is a loud snapping sound as Longbottom hexes Umbridge exactly as she does, and suddenly the shrieking cuts out as if somebody has thrown a switch. McGonagall takes a deep breath against the newly noiseless background, and turns to the boy with an almost imperceptible sigh. “Longbottom, what have you been told about never letting your guard down on an operation?”

He only goes faintly pink, but mutters a “Sorry, Professor” nevertheless.

“Yes, well.” She picks her hat up from where it had tumbled to the floor and puts it on, carefully setting it exactly square on her head. “Very well done, anyway.” 

His eyes brighten, and he finally ascends the last of the stairs to meet her on the landing, looking as if he still cannot believe what she has just said. “Really?”

“I hardly say these things for no reason, Mr Longbottom.”

But now that the euphoria of battle has evaporated, this place sickens her: she wants nothing more than to get out, to leave the filthy dust of her last war behind her. 

“Come along, Neville,” she says, and puts her hand on his shoulder. “Your fellow Aurors will be here soon enough. Let’s go home.”

He looks at her, their eyes now on a level, and nods.


End file.
